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Overview

WINNER OF THE 2019 UNT RILKE PRIZE

How does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din?

The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscapea thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagento the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.

Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince.

Product Details

About the Author

David Keplinger is the author of five volumes of poetry. He has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, the Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Book Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the DC, Danish, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC.

Read an Excerpt

Magic

In the padlocked trunk before they dropped him

in the river, Houdini was said to foresee

his mother’s death. Stuck in his box, at the end

• f a chain, he felt the death, its approach,

her worry growing smaller at the eyes as she

removed herself from herself, her body shrunken

to the size of a keyhole. I believe that grief

can travel distances like that. My mother’s

cough would wake me up at night, two hundred

miles away. That was a year ago, before she

got too small. She drowned in a cloud

• f bright white baby hair. She lay on the bed,

as if on a board, the last I saw her, still and calm.

Then truly as if a lever were pulled, she tipped

backwards, out of view.

***

The Liquid R

It was a language of white hills, red brick towns.

An alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar.

It was the old one tied against a chair, madness

swelling like a thought too big for her head,

and each death was a period. The mortician a stain,

a drop of ink in his black suit, before a page-white mausoleum.

It was a language of yeast soup, snowy hills, towns

called Beauty and Cold, where the names of things

had some corresponding order, beauty always going

cold, always losing itself to something permanent.

There was carp at the fishmonger, butcher paper

where the meat was weighed. Time at the clockmaker’s shop.

There were syntactical surprises: the headmaster

turned janitor inside of a day, the ambassador

seen on the subway in tattered clothes, the president

dressed as prisoner, delivering his acceptance speech,

the secret police as tourists on their own beat.

But mostly it was a language one used when speaking

in a whisper, rolling the “R,” practicing the “R”

in your mouth until it dropped from the palette

to the tongue as from the pocket of God, and hung there

momentarily in its shiny majesty, a sound much older

than the language that spent it, that offered it from one mouth

to another.

***

Embarrassment

En route to California, after crossing snowy Monarch Pass, I’d pull into a bar on Highway 50 called the Bear Claw. At his table my dead father sat in the green sleeveless jacket with orange on the inside. Or now and then the jacket was reversed, depending on whether he was hunting me or hiding.

Where have you been, I asked him, and he told me of the cities he had visited in death: Cherbourg, France, where there was a disappointing fistfight, and the streets of Manila, where he thought his murderer had been following him, but it was only himself as a young man, holding a pair of lost glasses in hand. In Port-au-Prince he had been a child living off crisp fish he ate in tiny bites, cooked over a barrel by the sea. He had been in my mother’s house, many times, unable to fix his contraptions as one by one they failed her.

My father was a man always crouched in a pose against embarrassment, which I inherited. So I understood. That’s why I never reached California, and I would turn around each time, risking my life all over again on Monarch Pass.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Another City

“In this book loss is not just something gone, but something that can be found somewhere else, say in a poem, this time made more beautiful. . . .Here the poet teaches uswith fine-grained tactics, atmospheric language and sustained energythat insight comes with craft.”  Washington Independent Review of Books

“The exquisite poems in David Keplinger’s Another City possess the weight and certitude of stone, yet break within one as geodes: their depths prismatic yet dreamlike, enigmatic yet also deeply familiar. From familial histories to Lincoln’s imperfect embalming, Marie Curie’s radioactive notebook to an examination of the ache of quotidian objects, there is a wholly radiant center to this collection, a dazzling multiplicity of cities and citizens, losses and revelations. The domes of these pagesboth funerary and celestialare those in which the great poets sing.” Katherine Larson

“Keplinger's voices accumulate to a rich texture, inflected by literature and travel. I’ve rarely stood back in such awe at a collection’s ordering principles, its bone structure. These cities open their mouths and sing.” Sandra Beasley

“I cherish and am grateful for these poems, for the way the sweep of them disturbs me out of my complacency, and although I’m not certain as to who it is who tells me these poems, who sometimes even sings these poems out loud so I can hear them rise above the noisy hubbub of our lives, I know that he is capable of a powerful wrenching of the past into the painfully clear light of knowing, and I know that he, this speaker, presentsor illustrates, reallya frighteningly familiar record of someone confronting the essence of who he is in the world in the middle of his life without any reaching for self-praise or even salvation.” Bruce Weigl

“Within the places (somatic, textual, geographical) that house us and those that we house within us, Davidfrank, compressed, darkly witty, and never far from a sense of mythic wondermakes clear that the purpose of a pilgrimage is to locate in any ‘city’ the profoundly humane citizenry of the isolato. ‘[D]eath is not the subject of our portrait. / It is,’ he writes in ‘The City of Birth,’ ‘the knowing you are seen, / it is the lighting of one’s light, it is to take / a body, knowing you are not the body. / That’s loneliness.’ In what Keplinger calls, in another poem, ‘our days of faithless translation,’ we are beyond lucky to have Keplinger interpreting our steps with ardent, articulate compassion.” Lisa Russ Spaar

“Like Joseph Cornell’s elegant and bewitching boxes, David Keplinger’s poems are miniatures which reveal a universe. Although they begin in the quotidian, they are apt to end in revelation, made all the more resonant thanks to Keplinger’s exacting metaphors and unerring command of free verse craft. Yet he also reminds us, again and again, that revelation is by no means easy to come by. As he writes in one of the poems, ‘Now for the rest of your life / you are trying to be born / through a wound,’ a passage of Rilkean intensity which suggests that for Keplinger the stakes are very high indeed. Another City is his finest collection yet.” David Wojahn

Praise for David Keplinger’s Translation of The Art of Topiary

“The Art of Topiary is a poetry collection of indescribable wonder. . . . David Keplinger's care in translating these from the original German never demands to be felt, and yet is inescapable. The Art of Topiary will stick with you long after its poems have been thoroughly devoured.”  The Atlantic

“David Keplinger’s translation seems to rise out of a love of language that’s almost mathematical in music and pace. Thus, each line is well made, composed of lyrical density and movement, and the reader experiences thisnot as conceit, but as actual. Each poem feels alive with intention, teaching us how to listen to its music. Here control becomes part of meaning. The mechanics of naturewhere the organic becomes metaphysical, or the natural sculptedare primary to the collection. This masterful accretive affect works in The Art of Topiary. Jan Wagner’s vision has been exacted with care and know-how as Keplinger carries into translation the truth of a gesture, and this is where poetry resides.” Yusef Komunyakaa

Praise for The Most Natural Thing

“Stunning and visceral . . . His prose is so well-crafted and compact that you’d think they wrote themselves into the worldthat they were born complete and right on their due date, with no complications.”  The Rumpus

“Evocative and haunting, a meditation on memory and the body and desire. It is, for the most part, a very quiet book that relies less on big stunning moments than small details . . . The fact that there is so much movement between the poems and across the book is remarkable.”  The Fiddleback

“A tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural.”  Triquarterly

“Somehow this clever magical poet’s fervor brings to the page a splendor of humanismthe extension of wit, delight and cynicism. He’s at the top of the heap of the originals.”  Washington Independent Review of Books

Praise for The Prayers of Others

“The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplingera question The Prayers of Others answers with a resounding yes.”  American Book Review

“The sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements.”  Antioch Review

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